


While I was Drowning, That's When I Could Finally Breathe

by Rainbowed_Linings



Category: The AM Archives (Podcast), The Bright Sessions (Podcast), The College Tapes (Podcast)
Genre: Angst/Comfort, Atypical Adam, Family Angst, Found Family, M/M, Multi, longfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28355538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rainbowed_Linings/pseuds/Rainbowed_Linings
Summary: If you asked Adam Hayes a few years ago if he could see a downside to becoming an actual super hero he probably would've laughed in your face, but now that he's been welcomed... sort of, onto the the rollercoaster of Atypical, featuring near-constant dangers, conspiracies, excessive amounts of kidnapping, and mad scientists he's far too close too, he's usually happy to hover on the edge. Until the day that's not an option.ORAn Atypical Adam AU where his tendency to put up walls manifests as a superpower to create forcefields and he has to deal with the ripple effects with his family, his found family, and the government agency he'd LOVE to be able to keep his distance from, but can't seem too.
Relationships: Adam Hayes/Caleb Michaels, Joan Bright/Jackson Crawford, Samantha Barnes/Mags Densmore
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	1. Did I Ever Really Crash, Or Even Make a Sound

**Author's Note:**

> Atypical Adam! Specifically Psionpath Adam because of that good old symbolism! Hope you enjoy this introduction! Chapter two probably coming soon because it's mostly written already.  
> CW for reference to alcohol, and depiction of claustrophobia (if i did my job right)   
> Thank you to the absolutely wonderful @soph_a_roo for being my beta and for listening to me constantly info dumb about this story on the discord (also thanks to Cassie, and various other amazing Discord people)   
> Hope you enjoy!

Apparently the entire universe decided to be obnoxious tonight. I try to take a deep breath. I want to reach up and cover my ears but my hands are busy jostling the strings of my hoodie. I bring my legs up into my desk chair and hug my knees, rocking slowly back and forth bouncing against the back of the chair. A part of me desperately wants to get up to retrieve my headphones from my nightstand but the idea of even the tiniest noise of chairs and floorboards creaking and things rubbing against and each other is repulsive at the moment. All I wanted to do was read. I stare intently at the pages of Lysistrata and attempt to glean an understanding and some tiny fraction of the entertainment value I was finding a few moments ago from the black smudges society assigned great meaning to. I can only make it a few words without losing focus now that all the sounds of a bunch of partying, drunk college students have it in their power to make poke at me like hot rods from all sides. Seriously, can the walls of college dorms even claim to be walls? Fun bonus, the stupid useless walls happen to also remind me just how fucking pathetic and lonely I am.   
Stop thinking, Adam. My internal monologue advises at that, about a thousand percent louder than it has ever had the right to be. Which only makes my desire for my thoughts to disappear that much more powerful. My hands switch from stimming with my hoodie strings to twisting the fabric of my sleeves into a strangle hold. Some drunk idiot in the apartment above me drops something and he might as well have dropped an anvil. I flinched as if the sound had actually struck me. There’s yelling. And someone seems to trip. My book, unfortunately neglected, falls shut with a supposedly soft thud that feels like hitting a bass drum. My deep breaths are way too loud in my ears. My roommate pads across to the bathroom in his slippers, each disturbance in the carpet making itself unfairly noticeable. Every thought and sound seems paranoid.   
“Shut the fuck up, universe,” I say the words at a volume that can barely be considered aloud, but it still registers with the audibility of a toddler in a room with an echo who doesn’t fully grasp the complicated art of quiet.   
I tilt my head to curse the normal people stomping around on my brain who dare to have typical, average brains that can consistently process sound and… a social life. I laugh at my own choice of words. I guess there’s a difference between typical and non-Atypical. I drop my hoodie sleeve. Suddenly it seems heavy and I’m hyper aware of it. My head hurts. I absently run a hand through my hair and feel it echoing right through my skull. `  
Then it’s… quiet. Actually quiet. Like something pressed reality’s mute button. I relax in my seat without fully realizing it until I hear no creak coming at me like a projectile. The pounding bass, the stomping, the general taunting of the universe, it doesn’t screech to halt, not really. It just… disappears. I know that’s impossible. I know there has to be some invisible frequencies bouncing in the air. That the party couldn’t have stopped so completely in an instant along with everything else. I don’t live in a dystopian novel. Well, not that kind. I see my roommate's shadow pass back to his bedroom, looking down at his phone, but I don’t hear his footsteps, or the door moving. I start bouncing my fist against my knee and find once again, the disconnect between the sounds I should still hate to hear. And am very much not.   
What the hell is happening?  
Then I see it. The, for lack of a better word, glowing bubble I’m confined inside. It’s hardly the size of my desk, a piece of furniture that while functional, has always been inconveniently small, a pet peeve that has taken on a hell of a lot more significance in the last few seconds. Shit. The word starts on a loop in my head as a few occur to me. Most immediate, I am trapped. In a very small space. Which should not exist. There is no door. I don’t know how this bubble came to exist. And I therefore have no clue how to reverse it from existence. But I think… I think I’m the one with the power to do that. Which is on its own completely terrifying. I shouldn’t be able to explain this. This very moment is a horrid one to be considering the The ramifications of the only explanation there is. But here I am. Considering them. And.. well, fuck.   
Priorities, Adam. The walls are way too close. Don’t acknowledge that, only making it worse. How does the whole breathing thing work again? Shit.   
How do I…?   
Breathe first. Take the walls down second. Okay, fuck that, breathing is for people who have doors to use. Is the bubble closing in? God no. Why would I do this to myself?!   
Okay, somehow, subconsciously, I should have some level of control over this, right? If my hypothesis is correct, at least. So… do something subconscious!  
I close my eyes. If I can’t see it, maybe I’ll forget it’s there. That proves impossible. I didn’t realize using an ability had a feeling like this. Caleb has never talked about that. Of course not, his ability is constant and would by nature overshadow any kind of feeling of its own. But this… Caleb told me once that my emotions remind him of the ocean, or standing on the shore, the cool waves running up to him and flowing away, or rushing up beneath his feet and pulling him under as they retreat. This isn’t quite that, more like… maybe breathing underwater? There’s a strength pulsing through the air around me, it feels lighter, and it's unfamiliarly freeing. Ah the irony, see brain, there’s this little pressing detail, in an important literal sense, I am quite trapped. In a literal sense, I’m untouchable. And yet… Now I’m in near constant danger. It’s impossible not to think about that. Not to think about Her. But… it’s impossible not to think about her.  
But this… it's a neon sign flashing in my face telling me You’re Not Like Them. So why am I still so stubbornly terrified? Why can’t I relax? Why did my subconscious build me super-powered barriers to separate me from even my own sense of sound? Am I protecting myself, or am I protecting other people from me. Because yes, maybe I’m waiting for them to need protection. I’m the villain’s protege. I come from people who look at Atypicals like a marvelous scientific mystery box. No, it’s my parents who think of it like that. They have the decency to treat them like semi-humans. They’re not the most horrifying part. It’s how Annabelle looks at them. Dear Auntie Annabelle. “Like she’d been missing one piece for a jigsaw puzzle and found it stuck to her shoe.” And that’s if I have the sickening luxury of being useful to her. Those are her favorite kind of people, always have been; the useful ones. What if this makes me useless to her. As far as I can tell useless Atypicals may as well be overpowered clumps of mud to Annabelle Whitney. No, to...Wadsworth.   
What the fuck am I supposed to do now?   
I start by taking a deep breath, and I think about Caleb. Thinking about telling him, it feels like… maybe this could be a good thing, somehow. I think about how happy it makes him to be around other Atypicals. I think about how much I always wanted to be like him. So I can give him that understanding. I have him. And I’m lucky, I have an Atypical family. I’ve never thought of them as mine, obviously they’re not. And I’m not deluding myself thinking anyone will forgive my family just because I’m Atypical. But maybe… Well, we have the neon sign now. I’m Not Like Them. It feels as weighted as smoke to me, but maybe that’s completely irrational. Maybe they’ll tell me this means I get to belong somewhere. I won’t believe them, but we can start acting like it’s true. The strength in the air flickers and fades and I feel suddenly very naked. I open my eyes, feeling idiotic for keeping them closed so long, and find the world restored to apparent total normalcy, no evidence that the bright and glaring world-shatter shield ever existed.


	2. Your Head is Pouring Gasoline on the Person You Would Rather Be

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam does a lot a bit of freaking out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is significantly longer than the last one, so I hope you enjoy! A lot of this was written a while ago, but I finally had another burst of motivation for this and so we here we are. Thank you so much for reading, and to the people in the TBS discord for listening to me ramble about it. I feel like I should have more say, but here you go! 
> 
> Title from Better Days by Radical Face

My hands shake as I find the buttons I need to press to hear Caleb’s voice from hours away. I’m grateful the movement is practically instinctive at this point because my brain is far too busy catastrophizing to be at all useful right now. After the ACTUAL FUCKING FORCE FEILD came down, I moved into one of the many campus libraries, which is especially abandoned on the night before summer.  
“Hey, it’s the dork I love! What’s up?” I am very tempted all of a sudden to play by our usual script, call him a meathead and tell him that the college students were being insane and I just wanted to hear his voice and leave out all the terrifying Atypical-ness. Hey, at least he can’t feel everything through a phone. “Do Atypical emotions feel different? Like, after Alice developed her super strength, did the feeling of her emotions change?” I realize a second too late that I’ve forgone any opening niceties of a phone conversation and opened with a very odd question. Though it’s not as if this was ever going to be a normal conversation.  
There’s silence on the other end. I haven’t asked questions like this in a while, I guess.  
“I mean… yeah, I guess, kinda. The essence of it is the same, but… her passion did feel different after that. Like it was super charged. Why are you…?  
‘I’m Atypical.’ Just say it, Adam. This will be the easiest one. This will be a good thing. I can hear it in my head. Me, claiming my title as the closest thing to a real life superhero there is, all confidence, pride, and awe. I open my mouth, prepared for exactly that to come out, but, as is abundantly clear, I’m lying to myself. The reality isn’t nearly as glamorous or welcoming as I really wish it could be. So, “Caleb I did something Atypical!” Are the words that rush out of my mouth instead, all at once, and I sound anything but proud and confident. My voice is thick and squeaking, I’m on the verge of tears. And honestly? I am a little furious. Seriously, what the fuck does the universe think it’s doing. Why does it keep making Atypicals out of the kids of people who hate them?  
Caleb’s quiet again, and he breaks it with a question that makes me feel like a complete asshole for my cowardly and unfortunate phrasing, “What the hell do you mean you ‘did something?’  
“I… not like that. I’m sorry. Caleb, I think I’m… have you ever heard of an Atypical who can… create force fields? Because I… just did that.” I serve away from my new… identity so many times in one sentence that it’s almost impressive, and I’m well-aware the imprecise language sounds nothing like me.  
I hear Caleb take a sharp breath through the phone, and then, he bursts out laughing, “Holy fuck, Adam.”  
“Holy fuck,” I echo.  
“You’re coming back to Boston for break, right?  
“Yeah… but, should I be riding the bus? If I have no control over when this Thing happens?”  
“Your ability is visible?”  
For whatever reason, my breath catches. Visible. “I’m fairly certain.”  
Caleb pauses, “Okay… so… I’ll come pick you up. We’ll process this together in the car tomorrow.” He’s smiling, I can hear it in his voice, and it makes my heart feel better. It always does.  
“I love you. And I want to tell you to get some rest but I know that would sound insane if I were you so… just try, okay? I’m sure this break will be more emotionally taxing than we were expecting.”  
I laugh harshly, “Right, sleep.”  
“Adam. Are you… okay?”  
“I thought we were waiting to process until tomorrow.”  
Caleb gives me a disappointed sigh for my mediocre efforts of avoidance.  
“Yeah, Caleb, I’ll be okay.”  
“I love you. So fucking much.”  
“I love you too.”  
I take a deep breath and try not to cheapen that. I’m so fucking lucky he keeps choosing me.  
“I think I’m… I think I’m really going to need you.”  
“Then I’ll always be here. Always.”  
It feels like that last word comes with an asterisk, yes I am expecting disastrous things. But how could you not be?  
“Love you, see you soon,” I tell him.  
I don’t say thank you. It feels far too small. I hang up the phone. That night I fell asleep in the library, numbing my brain with all the playlists Caleb has made and the Panic! album that always makes me think of him.

\-----

“Hey darling,” Caleb says, meeting me in the entrance of the library where I had a lonely slumber party last night. I mumble hi, about as animated as a puddle, but I know he knows I’m still happy to see him. That’s the wonderful thing about dating an empath.  
“So… my mom made Alice drive me because I may have told her we had some stuff we needed to talk through in the car.”  
“What?” A spike of fear pushes through my chest before I remind myself that we’re not on the phone anymore and I need to reign in my shit. A tiny, stupid, voice in the back of my head has the audacity to wonder if seeing him before I’d processed any of this was such a great plan, but I wasn’t about to pass up a chance. And I’m hoping he’ll understand my feelings better than I do right now.  
“I was very vague, I promise. This is too huge for someone else to say for you. I totally get that.”  
“Let’s just… go home. I…” am usually much better at forming coherent thoughts. It’s like I forgot how to be a fucking functional human being. Well, I never really tried that, but at least I knew how to be myself. Now I feel like, well, I am, a mutated Adam Hayes. Something buried in the unused percentage of my brain that my parents are always telling me about has surfaced, and it’s like an earthquake through the rest of my mind. Everything’s broken and twisted up now.  
“Adam. You’re… being really fucking quiet right now,” Caleb says, and I know that what he actually means is, wow, your feelings are horrible. Hey, at least he’s not Chloe, because I know this is bad, I do. I know this is a terrible way to talk to myself. But… scientifically speaking, I am a mutant.  
“Hey! Guys! Stopping staring into each other's eyes and get in the car! I have shit to do today!” Alice shouts from the window of Caleb’s mom’s old silver Jeep Wrangler.  
I laugh bitterly. Well, at least I still seem normal.  
Caleb and I get into the back seat of the car, even though the passenger seat is empty, and Alice starts driving.  
“So, what’s up, Hayes?”  
I groan. Which, I’m well aware, is a terrible way to get Alice Micheals to stop focusing on me, but also paints a better picture of the shit show happening in my brain than any articulate thought could.  
“Oh wow.” She says dryly, “what great conversational skills.”  
“Give him a break Ali,” Caleb says.  
“He just got in my car. Least he could make uncomfortable small talk that neither of us actually want to be having!”  
I actually laugh. “Well, what an inviting start.” There. A normal Adam Hayes sentence. I did it. Somehow, today, that’s fucking progress, because I’m currently the living embodiment of a error message.  
I lean my head on Caleb’s shoulder and he quickly takes the opportunity to wrap his arm around me. Perks of sitting in the back seat to be with your boyfriend. Alice, forever in character, makes gagging noises from the front seat.  
That drive is one of the quietest of my life, at least in terms of words spoken aloud. Because usually I’d have stories to tell, or say random shit to distract from the annoying weird little noises that cars make. But today, I’ve crashed, partially from the after effects of a sensory overload last night, and partially from the brain cracking open and fresh mutations.  
Okay, I really need to stop using the word ‘mutations.’ I’m not a member of the X-Men. And… well, never mind, I can’t exactly say there's nothing wrong with me.  
“Adam,” Caleb says quietly, “We said we’d process in the car.”  
“Well, we wouldn’t want to distract the driver now, would we?” I shoot back.  
“Adam," Caleb says, his “Look, I really don’t take a deep dive into this! I can hardly handle thinking about it at all!”  
“But you are, aren’t you? This isn’t something you don’t think about. You have a superpower, Adam. You can’t brush that under the rug!”  
“It’s not a fucking superpower! It’s something fundamentally inhuman about my brain!” I should not have said that out loud. I shouldn’t believe it at all.  
Alice screeches the car to a halt and then remembers she’s still on a road, and quickly fixes that. Pulling over into the empty parking lot of our old high school, which is the most empty I’ve ever seen, seeing as it’s a Saturday in May.  
She twists around in her seat to glare at me. Caleb looks… resigned, though there’s something smoldering in his eyes when he looks back up at me. I really hope he’s not mad at me.  
“Saying shit like that is exactly why you should be processing this.”  
“I don’t know how Caleb. It’s hard enough for you. How the hell am I supposed to process the fact that I’m…” I take a deep breath and reshape the thought, “The type of human that my loved ones think of as… specimens for especially fascinating experimentation?”  
Caleb is silent for a long time. Because there’s nothing in the world you can say to that that could even begin to make it more manageable.  
Alice, in her seemingly endless blunt wisdom, breaks the thick silence first, “But what can you do?”  
“Create force fields. I think.”  
“A Psionpath,” Alice informs me, “That’s the word they use at the AM. I think.”  
The AM. That is a whole other can of worms.  
I toss that around in my head. Psionpath. There’s a word. There’s people like me. Alice might know one of them?  
She sighs, “We’re almost home, let’s just… we can talk this through with Dr. Bright.”  
“I object strongly,” I say, “She would have to report this to Them, right? And my aunt can’t know. And neither can Rebecca.”  
“She’s a therapist, she can keep your secrets.”  
“Oh yeah, because she’s historically done so well with doctor-patient confidentiality!” I remind her.  
“There was a literal mind reader involved, and your only other option is going straight to the AM carrying all your Auntie Wadsworth baggage and risk running into your mad scientist parents!”  
The blanket of waves takes me in the warm isolation of its current a second time. “Ow. Shit!” Caleb groans beside me, shirking against the car door on his side now that apparently thorny walls are emanating from my being. I take note that I can still hear this time, which is… odd. I don’t think I know of any atypicals with more than one presentation of their ability. Though i also don’t really know any Class Cs. which, if I had to guess, I am now. This time the bubble is less of a bright pale blue and more of a purple, blue and gray, swirling around me like a storm cloud.  
“Whoa. Okay. That is…”  
“Definitely Atypical.” Caleb confirms. As if anyone in the vehicle needed a third fucking opinion.  
“Mad scientists parents? I sputter, “You really want to pick this fucking moment to go there?!”  
“I…” I’ve never seen Alice Micheals at such a complete loss for words. I guess that happens when you just used them in the worst possible way.  
“That was incredibly disrespectful, Alice.”  
She purses her lips and I can almost hear the retort she’d give in any other moment, “Experimenting on people in the military with other people’s DNA sounds pretty damn disrespectful too.” But she doesn’t say any of that. She opens her mouth, closes it, and turns back toward the steering wheel.  
“Let’s go to Sam’s house.” Caleb decides.  
“What, your sister doesn’t want to drive me straight into the arms of the ‘mad scientists’?” I say pointlessly. My parents’ house is the last place I want to be right now and we all know it.  
Caleb sighs and I see him shift to lay his head back on my shoulder before remembering the small little detail, the pulsing storm cloud between us that lashed out at him a moment ago. Shit. Right. I hurt him.  
“Wait, how much did that hurt a second ago?” I try to keep the panic out of my voice, a futile and failed endeavor.  
“Don’t worry about it,” Caleb says, which, notably, is never actually an answer to your question.  
“Jesus Caleb, this is fucking important. If I hurt you, you have to properly communicate that fact.”  
Alice laughs at me from the front seat where she's decided to pull out of the parking lot, and I hear her mutter something about communication skills.  
“You didn’t hurt me, okay?”  
Caleb is bad at lying. Yes I did. I hurt people now. Because I have a dangerous mutation. I look like a fucking storm cloud sitting in the back of this car and my boyfriend can’t even touch me because my trust issues have been weaponized by my own oh so very fascinating “top secret” brain.  
Yeah, in a house with the excitable, prying eyes and endless invasive questions of a classic Hayes family interrogation ranks dead last on the list of Situations I’d Like to Be in Right Now.  
“Adam, you do trust me, right?”  
“Of course I do,” And I know his Empath senses tell him to believe me, but it helps a lot that the Physical Manifestation of My Trust Issues starts to flicker when I say it. Everyone in the car takes a collective deep breath when the flickering ends and it doesn’t come back.  
“Then trust me when I say, you’re not going to hurt me.”  
I reach over and intertwine my fingers in his. I still can’t let myself believe him, and he knows it, and it must suck for him too, but we move on.  
The rest of the drive is blissfully dull. Not awkward, or in any way up-beat, just...casual, Caleb and I make fun of Alice’s music tastes, and Caleb tells me about Frankie, a theater-geek, computer-science major freshmen who Caleb’s friend Sadie introduced to him a few weeks ago. Who is Atypical. An electropath. Which means he’s basically Thor, and that’s cool as hell.

I always forget how rich Sam is until I see her house again. It’s not as if my family doesn’t have money; being raised by two workaholic neurosurgeons does that for a person, but Sam’s house is… decadent. It’s a large A-frame with a very well kept and flowery front yard. And there are always people here. A reality that weighs on me as we walk up to ring the doorbell.  
“Oh hey boys!” Sam says when she gets the door, “So great to see you again, Adam!”  
I offer her a smile that’s mostly real, “You too, who all is here?”  
“Oh, just Mags and Mark, and Joan said she might stop by soon.”  
I try my best not to freak out, but Mark’s name catches my attention. Bile rising in my throat, but I know it would be too weird to turn around and leave right after interacting, so I push myself through Sam’s doorway, which usually feels more welcoming.  
Mags smiles, “Oh hey! It’s the college kids! They’re back from the home of existential crises!”  
“Hey Maggie!” Caleb says teasingly, taking a seat beside her.  
Mags’ face scrunches up, “Must you call me that?”  
“Yes.” Caleb deadpans.  
“Hey, what’s up with you?” Mark asks, staring at me like he expects my face to morph.  
“Uh, why do you ask?” I ask, partially to delay the enviable strangeness, and partially because I’m honestly curious if he cares more about the waves of misery that must be coming off me, or the whatever it feels like to recognize an Atypical ability. Coming from his… Atypical-hating, worst enemy's nephew.  
“Well um… do you want to pretend it's not there?”  
“Oh, I’d fucking love too, but I feel like we’ve eliminated that option here.”  
He grimaces, “Sorry kid.”  
“What?” I’ve never heard Mark Bryant apologize to me before, because I guess he never felt I had the right to an apology when I come from a family of such horrid monsters. And now I’m the whole other kind of monster.  
“Hey uh, someone wanna… catch up the rest of us on… whatever’s happening between you too,” Sam asks.  
“Adam’s Atypical,” Alice informs the room from where she stands in the doorway, about to turn away to whatever important business she has today.  
I’m aware that I shouldn’t flinch. That what she’s said is a simple fact, one that I should be perfectly capable of admitting myself. But I do flinch. And stupidly my eyes string, and I clench my fist because I feel more protected then. As if being more tense will get Alice to shut her mouth. The words still just feel so wrong, especially spoken aloud. Alice leaves. Everyone else stares at me in varying degrees of shock, disbelief, sympathy (or maybe pity, I’ll have to ask Caleb) And… whatever's happening on Mark’s face. I thought that maybe this development would make me feel like less of a pariah around these people. I don’t.  
“Hey, welcome to the club of weirdos! Glad to have you!” Mags cheers, at odds with the sticky, uncomfortable silence everyone else has fallen into, “And… I am clearly missing something huge.”  
“You could say that,” I say.  
“What’s your ability?” Sam asks.  
“Psionpath,” Marks answers for me when a few very long seconds pass without me saying a word. I was going to say, ‘Build literally walls out of my trust issues that hurt people who try to touch me’, but that is neither concise, nor a perspective I would feel great flaunting in the group of Atypicals who spend lots of time with a therapist. At least she’s not here. Yet.  
“Oh, well that’s… probably going to be useful.” Sam says, uncharacteristically the one to find a bright side.  
“No, it’s not.”  
“Why not? It protects you, right? Nobody can… do anything to you.”  
“Physically,” Mark is the one to point out, which catches me off guard, though I think that’s mostly the way he’s looking at me. Like… he cares. That’s not to say I didn’t believe Mark cared at all about before… it’s different now. More protective, and less… “I like your boyfriend and I’d prefer it if nothing terrible happened to you out of principle, but also I hate what you represent”. Which is an entirely understandable way to feel about me considering the toture he’s endured because of the people who basically raised me, but that didn’t make it suck any less.  
It’s visible. And anyway it’s not the spe  
“If you need anything… and you can crash on my couch if you want… wait, no, I have guest rooms,” Sam offers.  
“We’ll see, I think I’ll probably stay with Caleb mostly, if that’s okay,” I add quickly, turning to Caleb.  
“Of course it’s okay, you dork.” He ruffles my hair and puts his arm around me again, pulling me into his warm, wide chest, “Unless you’re not okay with my parents knowing yet.”  
“Oh, it’s not your parents who are the damn concern.”  
“It’ll be okay, your parents love you.”  
I don’t say a word. I know my parents love me. That’s not the question. The question is if they will ever look at me the same way. The question is if they’ll really be capable of separating their Atypical science experiments from their son. I know that in this new context Project Unity should make me even more furious but… it all just feels hopeless instead.  
I hoist myself up onto the back of Sam’s couch and deflate, burying my head in my hands, “All I know is, going home and pretending nothing’s wrong isn’t a possibility.”  
“But… nothing IS wrong, right? No one is explaining the problem properly.” Mags insists, still perplexed.  
Everyone just sort of stares at me, waiting for me to tell Mags about my fucked up family, until Caleb decides I’m absolutely not going to do it, and does the wonderful thing and says it for me, “It’s Wadsworth, she’s… important to him.”  
“She’s my aunt who I haven’t spoken to in more than two years,” I quickly course correct. And I’ll never feel safe speaking to her again. I wish that didn’t hurt so much. It shouldn’t, it shouldn’t hurt that I don’t get to have a relationship with a woman who tortures people. It’s not like I was trying, or that it was really part of my plan to try again someday. But there’s a difference between not wanting a relationship, and knowing for a fact that she would reject me just because… I’m a person like me now. Some tiny, idiotic voice buried in my head wonders if I could change things. She knows I’m not dangerous. There’s no way I’m taking a risk like that though.  
Mags opens her mouth and must come to the conclusion there’s nothing she wants to say. Or maybe that there are no productive words to be said.  
“I’m sorry,” I find myself saying. I want to disappear.  
“It’s okay. ...what are you apologizing for?” Sam assures me.  
It’s always been an unspoken rule in my head that I should avoid bringing her up as much as possible. Especially her name. And I just broke that rule.  
“I… don’t know.” I slump down further into the coach.  
“So… what’s your plan here? Are you… going to do a program at the AM?” Sam asks.  
“That’s my only option, right? I can’t go home until I have this…” dangerous glitch, “at least under control.”  
“You don’t feel safe enough around your parents to assume your ability wouldn’t be triggered?”  
“It’s not a question of safety. It’s not like I felt physically threatened alone in my apartment reading.” I wonder if anyone noticed that I didn’t actually answer the question. “and you know we don’t have enough examples of the event to look for a causation.”  
“So science-y,” Mags teases.  
“I have my very occasional moments.”

“So… you want to pinpoint a causation so you know which situations you need to take yourself out of in public,” Sam says, “Like how my ability is triggered by anxiety.”  
“Except that you're scared to do that because it means willingly using your ability.”  
Mark says it quietly, but at some point in this discussion he’s moved closer to me than I think he’s ever been, so I hear him anyway.  
“Is… is Chloe hiding in the curtains or something?”  
Mark laughs darkly and it turns into a sigh, “I’ll take that as a yes then?”  
“I don’t know how to do this.”  
“Well, step number one is to find a place where you feel safe doing it.”  
“And where is that exactly? The bottom of the fucking ocean?”  
Mark runs a hand through his dark hair, “Well… right now, considering the guidance you’ll need that none of us really have the understanding to give... and it's the only space specialized for Atypical abilities and biology…”  
“Yeah. So to the God damn AM then.” 

I need to get this the fuck over with. I need to get my brain under control again, make it feel like it belongs to me again, and that I’m not just a teeny pawn in whatever twisted game the universe is playing right now. I’m really over the whole being people’s insignificant pawn thing.


End file.
